THE NEW YOR.KER. had refused to admit-or, for that mat- ter, to deny-that it possessed any chemical weapons at all. The first breakthrough came in March of 1987, at the disarmament conference in Ge- neva, when the chief Soviet negotia- tor, in discussing terms for a proposed international convention, declared that chemical weapons would "be de- stroyed by all states possessing such weapons, including both the Soviet Union and the United States." Then, in December of that year, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, referring scornfully to "absolutely fantastic 'da- ta' " being put out by Amer- ican spokesmen on chem- ical-weapons stocks in the U.S.S.R., asserted that So- viet stocks of chemical weap- ons "do not exceed fifty thousand tons in terms of poisoning substances," and it maintained that, "according to Soviet expert estimates, this corre- sponds to the chemical-weapons stocks of the United States." The statement further noted that the Soviets had never used such weapons, or allowed them to be moved beyond Soviet borders, and that the recent resumption of chemical- weapons production by the United States was "nothing short of an attempt to torpedo the process of chemical dis- armament." In a speech at the Foreign Ministry in July of 1988, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze suggested that the creation of a Western strategic front in Europe could have been avoid- ed "if at the time we had correctly assessed our own national interests." He then posed this question: "What were we following over the last fifteen years in working to establish a 'chem- ical rampart'? This cost colossal amounts of money and diverted large production capacities, manpower, and resources." In a written response to a series of questions in Pravda last June, Shevardnadze criticized the Soviet mil- itary for their lack of candor concern- ing the true cost to the Soviet people of past chemical-weapons policies. "Why, for example, the silence on the part of those who supposedly bolstered the country's securities by putting chemical weapons on the production line and kept them in production after everyone else in the world had stopped making them?" he asked, and he went on to complain, "N ow we must either develop a technology for destroying those weapons and spend at least three billion rubles in the process, or these toxic materials will turn whole regions into wastelands." What this declared diversion of so much money and production capacity may have amounted to is hard to de- termine, and will undoubtedly take considerable time to sort out in the course of the mutual on-site inspections provided for in the mid -1990 sum- mit agreement. Western estimates of the size of Soviet chemical-weapons stockpiles have varied enormously. While the United States Defense and State Depart- ments have been wary of is- suing official estimates, they have not hesitated to provide reporters and columnists with deep-background leaks concerning Soviet chemical- weapons capabilities. The resulting articles have tended to cite such sources as "Western specialists," "Western experts," and "military experts." Typical of the genre is a Moscow dispatch by Serge Schmemann that appeared in the New York Times on April 6, 1984, and noted that "Western experts" said that the Soviet Union had at least three hundred thousand tons of chemical weapons. Within the next six weeks, this particular estimate was raised by fifty thousand tons in a U.P.I. report and was converted, in the Washington Times, into an estimate of the amount of nerve gas alone ("NATO estimates that the Soviet Union has some 300,000 tons of nerve gas"). In Octo- ber, 1987, a Reuters dispatch put the informed American estimate of chemi- cal weapons possessed by the Soviets at "500,000 to 600,000 tons." Other press reports put Western estimates of the Soviet chemical arsenal as high as seven hundred thousand tons. In the course of passing such figures along, reporters paid little or no attention to qualifications without which such esti- mates were almost meaningless-for example, whether the tonnage figure referred to the total weight of chemical munitions or to the payload alone, and what the precise types and the relative lethalities of the weapons were. Ac- cording to an article in the Washing- ton Post on November 9, 1989, the Defense Intelligence Agency, in con- tributing to an intelligence-community review preparatory to upcoming Amer- ican on-site inspections of some So- 65 i.' ,. , \ I \,,\ "' ".y . << ... . V\. r . . tt ',. T ., ..,,;;;: .,p "'- ./ .10 ..-r " '1'-" " .... - .... 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